Pages

Saturday, March 24, 2012

The Day I Got Run Over by a Canoe

In the landscape of the Big City, mankind is confronted with a full spectrum of dangers to life and limb. It is not too great an exaggeration to say that here, peril lurks around every corner. Even for such an experienced and skilled Land Pirate as myself, a mere moment’s hesitation could mean disaster.

Why, if time and space but permitted, I could tell you tales the likes of which would leave all you denizens of rural and small town America running for the hills!

For I have seen the sewer rats descend upon the downtown Family Law Center Park after rush hour is over. I’ve seen a man try and drive his car through the wall of an eighth floor parking garage only to fail and leap out into the street to his death. I have even watched – on two separate occasions – as a METRO bus drove into the side of a rail car, knocking the rail car right off of its track.

The horror! The horror!

But there is nothing, nothing in heaven or earth that could have prepared me for what happened at the corner of Main Street and Walker this past Tuesday.

I remember it like it was yesterday…

It was in the early afternoon and I was – as usual – engaged in a most heroic mission, the details of which escape me now. And in the course of this heroic mission, I had the misfortune of coming to that notorious corner whose name shall now live on in infamy.

Main Street and Walker [to be read in menacing voice].

And though the crosswalk light was on – meaning the downtown gods had smiled on me with nine or perhaps even ten full seconds in which to rush across Main before all Hell broke loose again – I found myself unable to get across. For there at the red light, my finely-tuned eyes spied a tiny, tiny passenger vehicle atop which was strapped the most massive canoe ever to curse the streets of downtown Houston.

Not the actual offending canoe.
For demonstrative purposes only.

Now, I clearly, unquestionably, and most heroically had the right of way, but that tiny car kept inching forward until it had rolled right over the crosswalk and was nearly within the intersection itself!

I proceeded to take defensive action. This consisted primarily of making ominous faces at the driver and shrugging a lot. But the driver, who was engrossed in doing something-or-other with his phone – googling the location of the nearest lake for his massive canoe, perhaps? – remained blissfully unaware of my annoyed gesticulations.

Obviously, this turn of events would leave your average man, woman, or sexually indeterminate land dweller hopelessly stranded on that corner, maybe even permanently. But the first rule of being a Land Pirate is this: Always have a Plan B.

I had a Plan B.

I edged my way around the offending car, intending to cross the street behind that noxious driver in the 4 or 5 seconds remaining for the crosswalk light. But as I stepped out around the end of the canoe, which stuck at least four feet off the back of the car’s roof, that car – canoe and all – suddenly and unforeseeably lurched backwards!

As well as I can reconstruct the events which followed, I was struck upon the head, either by the tip of the tip of the canoe or the side of the tip of the canoe. As the car roared off to locales unknown, I staggered backwards, tripped over a convenient curb, and lay on my back upon the sidewalk.

Anyway, that’s probably what happened.

The next thing I remember, I heard some clopping sounds and opened my eyes to see the face of a man far, far above me. The face was attached to a body, and the body wore a police uniform, and this whole face/body/uniform amalgamation sat perched upon a titanic horse.

It was probably a Clydesdale, but it might have been one of those giant breeds, long thought to be extinct, which in days of yore stalked the Arabian Peninsula eating stray camels and unwary caravans of travelers.

“Ma’am, are you alright?” a sound emerging from the face spoke in my general direction. The man’s face, I mean. Not the horse’s.

I found that I was holding the side of my head and crying. Heroically, of course…

I said, “I got hit!”

The man in the uniform looked around him. “Right here? By a car?”

“No, by a canoe!” I cried.

The man in the uniform began to appear less and less concerned with my situation. “Ma’am, where is this canoe now?”

I rubbed at the side of my head, right at the point of the impact. “I don’t know. It was a hit and run.”

The man in the uniform considered this for a moment. “A hit and run canoe on Main Street?”

“Yes.” I sniffled. It was true.

The horse took a couple clops backwards, and its rider said, “Ma’am, would you be able to stand up for me?”

Either the horse or its rider, or maybe the horse and its rider had sized me up as a drunk or a homeless person, or maybe a drunken homeless person. But I was not a drunken homeless person, or not this week, anyway. I was a hero on a mission. And so I stood up, just as I had been asked to do.

I still clutched the side of my head a bit, though.

Then the man in the uniform looked me up and he looked me down. “Ma’am, are you going to need to go to a hospital? Do you want to get checked out?”

No. No, I still had a mission to complete.

So the horse and the man and the uniform all turned and started making their way back down Main Street. But I heard him exclaim as he clopped out of sight, “I’ll be sure to put an APB out for that canoe!”

I don’t think the canoe has caused me any permanent damage. I can still count from one to seventeen, and I still know that Barry Hussein Soetoro is currently occupying the people’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue, and I know that someday, somehow, I am going to find that rotten bastard with the canoe.

I am on a new mission now, you see, and I will walk these Big City streets until I can have my revenge.

66 comments:

Oh Katy. I am sorry about the accident.I am laughing not at the incident but it is pretty funny and the narration is sweet.I recently got another car and when I had to change number plate all I had to do was to pay 100$ and get anything I wanted either my name, f!@# U or UCNTC or MYASS something that would make you remember instantly.Do you know why I didnt choose those? Because of people like you whom I can hit and flee the scene, and send you guys on witch hunt - like looking for canoe. "an asian/indian driving a toyota/honda" and "number something like 3 digits from left of the value of square root of 13 digit prime number"

I had an 18' aluminum canoe until my lovely wife refused to help me put it on top of our jeep. The damn thing was heavy. I then had a lawn ornament that blew across the Indiana prairie every time we had a good gust of wind. I say this only to mention that having been attacked by car top canoes before, they leave a nasty bite mark. Good for you for carrying on your mission injured as you were. (Had you stopped, the secretary would had disavowed any knowledge of your actions)

Eagle Creek Park on the NW side of Indy had a nice size lake and did not allow power boats. It is the only place to take a canoe. There are a ton of good canoeing rivers/creeks in Indiana. We always avoided lakes around any major drinking holiday. I still want to build a small wooden sail boat, but that has more to do with being brain damaged than anything else. I am too lazy to row and I don't enjoy powerboats. That leaves only 1 option.

My grandfather always wanted a boat of some sort - ideally, a sailboat, but if he couldn't have that, just something to say he had a boat. He never got one. He said it was the money, but I don't believe they couldn't afford a canoe.

Holy fucking shit.... You always make me feel like a hack. You're truly gifted. This was amazing in every way. It was hilarious in its absurdity and I'm crazy jealous of how you seem to just pull these things out of thin air. In this case granted, you had a fucking CANOE come out of thin air, but you know what I mean. I'm gonna go do shots of maker's mark. I'll have one for ya!

Whoa. I feel partially responsible. I too live in Houston. I have driven with kayaks (not canoes, I have an alibi!)on my car. There's a launching place by the parking garage on Prairie next to the bayou. Or if you traverse Memorial, you'll find your offending canoe-towing auto to be sure. By the way, who cleans up after the horse-cops? Do they have poop-catching bags? Driving downtown, I always carry a snake in case I get pulled over by a horse cop. Snake spooks horse, I drive away free.

I never knew that about a Prairie Street launching pad. I'm going to have to go check it out! It wasn't so much the canoe that caused the problem in this case, though, as it was just poor driving. Plenty of Houston drivers manage that without canoes.

Sometimes nobody cleans up after the horses. At other times, there are these guys with yellow shirts and safari hats who come around with brooms (seriously!).

Then again, I don't know Houston. The guy before me seems to know the layout, complete with likely launch-spots in the middle of downtown (?) for such things.

(I understand that there are single-family homes right next to high-rises in Houston, too - this supposedly dates from the 1870's, when Houston was the first city in America to reject the notion of city planning - I guess they thought it was Communist, or Socialist, or whatever passed therefore at the time. Regardless, while it's surreal, it's not surprising that there's a canoe-launching spot right next to a parking garage....)

The location that the good pickle describes would make sense. The bayou runs right by downtown - and is the reason we're here at all. Years ago, I read about how the Allen Brothers found this place on which to establish Houston. It went something like this: "So we went up the bayou, and when we came to the place where the mosquitoes were thickest, we saw a tent and some alligator prints, and figured this must be the place."

In the suburban neighborhoods, the deed restrictions keep the "no zoning" weirdness to a minimum, but in my neighborhood, not so much. If I didn't have a pizza joint in a house from the 1920s on one side of my four story townhouse, and a lawyer's strip-mall office on the other side, I wouldn't really be free.

Looks like it's time to find every body of water in a 10 mile radius, assemble the 5 most likely canoes, and put them into a police lineup. Then you can walk from canoe to canoe, bumping your head against the end of each one, until you say, "THIS one, officer! This is the offending canoe! I'd recognize the lip of this boat anywhere!"

That canoe looks a lot like the one I used to own. I never hit anyone with it, though. What he was doing in downtown Houston with one is puzzling unless he was headed to Buffalo Bayou and got lost in the dizzying array of one way streets. That, or bashing people with a canoe is a new sport, sort of like jousting. I hope you weren't injured badly.

I'm hoping so. I miss reading your blogs. I'm starting to get the hang of using this cell phonenin the Internet.

On an unrelated issue, The Green Hornet movie you said you would like to see is on Starz this month it appears. I don't subscribe to it, but they're having a free preview of the channel for the next couple days if you have U-verse.

I remember that you wanted to see it because it was directed by Michel Gondry, too. See, not too bad for a senile old man. lol

If I had gone expecting it to be serious like the television version was, I might have been disappointed, but Jay Chou's martial arts might have been enough to make me like it even so. The effects were pretty good. I really liked the flying bottle caps and the expanding cars. If Seth Rogen hadn't played the part like some moronic college dropout, it might have been a little better, though.

Katy (little darlin`), i cant get Bill the Butcher to understand that he owes his entire existence as an all-American citizen in 2012 (along with 300 million other lucky all-American citizens, including your good self of course) to Paul Tibbets and Charles Sweeney, every American citizen owes literally everything they have in life to those two geezers. Could YOU try explaining that to Bill because, like i said, he doesn`t seem interested in "the truth" as explained to him by me, so maybe he`d be more prepared to listen to "the truth" from you little darlin`. Thanks Katy, there just seem to be such a high number of "bleeding-heart-liberal" hypocritical Americans out there who enjoy biting the hand that feeds them, and that really gets on my bloody nerves ! ! !.

Well Katy, to put it another way: Every person in the free world (not just American citizens) owe their freedom and liberty directly to Tibbets and Sweeney, so could you just verify and reafirm that for Bill please Katy (irrespective of whether hes actually an American citizen or not), Cheers little darlin`.

Oh boy, I didn’t know that the internet blog world is a war of attrition, where complete idiots waste their lives away, baiting and hoping that they could get other idiots to waste theirs in return, on some outrageously stupid and irrelevant topics and ideas, that only showed how pathetic the brains that thought them up in the first place were.

Oh well, since I am here already, for God knows why, I might as well admit my fate and put in my sweat and blood to keep this pinwheel going, in an feeble attempt to make the other guy the BIGGER idiot:

In this interrelated and interdependent world, where everything in this universe at this moment are the direct and only result and continuance of everything in this universe at the previous moment, then you, Teddy the BIGGER idiot, must admit and pay homage to a couple of imbeciles named Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who single-handedly gave meaning to your pathetic life, right?

Wow, I just got some enlightenment on this blog page today, who’d have thought?!

Oh gosh, thanks, I guess my sporadic insults of other select and specific commenters are more like works of art, so it’s a shame to delete them, huh?

I will be happy to put out more of those, especially when you are just too nice or too numb to properly respond to the ass who constantly bombard you with derogatory and passive-aggressive insults such as “little darlin’.”

Human garbage like him hunts all day long for a nice person like you, who would give them a chance to spill their poison. And once you let one out, he then just can’t stop himself from sending you more and more worse ones. You should simply ignore him and his worthless existence like you did in earlier months.

If I were you, I would instead send him a few nude photos and then invite him to a back alley in Mexico City, where a couple of brothers would put an end to his misery. Some trash just need to be taken out once a while, in order to keep this world clean.

Katy, its obvious that "on5464" is someone who likes to bite the hand that feeds them as well, they obviously need to be educated too with regards to exactly why they are living the good life as an American citizen in the America of 2012 ! ! !, shall you do the honors Katy or shall i ?.

Oh no, you chicken, I don’t bite the greedy American international conglomerates that feed me the six-figure income that they extracted out of your dilapidated hide every year. Nor do I bite your fellow countrymen who actually had schooling on history, justice, science, and the arts, even when most of them were the bloody slave-runners and opium-peddlers for centuries.

I do bite, however, chicken like you who is too filthy for my indoor oven, so I would grill your boney ass on my good old American BBQ smoker, on any day of the year, and twice on St. Patrick’s.

Exactly right "on5464", just as the Japanese and Krauts had to be taken out in 1945 so that 67 years later individuals like yourself could live pampered and easy lives like gods on high Olympus in the America of 2012.

Katy, if you curtail the feud between "on5464" and "teddy crescendo" you will be denying yourself an incredible amount of laughter over the next few days. on 5464's "lies and hypocricy" vs Crescendo's "truth" would have been absolutely hilarious (and still could be if you let the feud continue as i`ve requested).

"on5464", you dont seem to understand, the slave-runners and opium peddlers dont matter one iota now, the ONLY things that matter from the past are the two giant mushrooms on Japan and Adolf and eva snuffing it in that bunker in Berlin just over three months earlier. They are the specific reasons why you (and millions of others like you) are now able to enjoy things like a BBQ and ludicrous, idiotic, pathetic, frivolous nonsense like St. Patricks day.

Katy. OK, first, thanks for the funny story. As a fellow Texan and Houston visitor, I find that your native city's streets are just as dangerous as you report. I was almost squished by a woman backing her buick-with-a-motorized-cart-on-the-trunk into a handicapped parking place. She failed to adjust for the extra three feet of offending appendage and backed into my car.

She was, of course, pissed at me. After carefully explaining how stupid I was to park within a foot of the yellow line, she asked me to repark her car with the cart facing out. Next, I helped her remove the cart from its mangled carrier so the weight challanged lady could drive away.

She sat her large ass on the cart and said, "I'll need your proof of insurance to file a claim."

Second, I want to thank you for keeping little Teddy Crescendo caged up here to Lesbianland. He sounds so much like my own Ted--missing for months now--and I've been worried about him. I feel better knowing that he is safe in your loving care.

I have stopped to help someone out after witnessing a one-car accident before and had the person ask me for my insurance. My insurance agent later asked me why I gave it to the driver. I said, "I was taught to respect my elders, I guess."

I suppose it's the same everywhere, but texting while driving has really added an extra level to the challenge of driving in recent years.

It's taken it to the next level of the video game: Same idiots as the lower level, but now they are texting, too.

Shit, that's funny! Katy, you have just won a prominent place in my "signs of intelligent life" blobber roll at my place... (the only benefit of which is occasional visits from miscreants and pervs who lurk but rarely comment).

Thank you! That means a place on YOUR page comes with one more advantage than a place on my blogroll comes with. Maybe more than one, actually, if you decide to start counting the disadvantages of my page as taking you below the zero threshold.

Katy, i told you that the slave runners and opium peddlers from the past are completely irrelevant, all that matters now is that America is in charge (thankfully) and you are an American citizen living in America, be thankful Katy, just be thankful.

I found the car with the canoe, though! Someone I know from Tumblr had posted a picture of it on his page because the person works at his sister's building and it looks absurd sitting in the parking lot.

I didn't do anything about it other than put a printout of this blog under the windshield wiper.

“You deserve to be gassed or shot, depending on the circumstances. You're a health risk, a risk to children, and a risk to society. Sick, disgusting dyke. Crawl off and DIE.”– Paula A. R. DeAngelis, PhD